Creative Word and Cultural Self-Apprehension: Traditional Verbal Formulae in Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman

Abstract

The Yoruba have a saying that “proverbs are the horses of speech”. The real master of proverbs must also be an expert wrangler with words. Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s most talented playwright, is one of these. No other African writer has displayed so much agility in manipulating traditional verbal formulae. Death and the King’s Horseman, Soyinka’s major play, best embodies the multiplex dimensions of the playwright’s construct of an African poetics simultaneously polarizing the conflict between a traditional African, organic vision of life and an alien system of discrete laws and social policy, with tragic results for the indigenous system.

Bibliography

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